Sunday, March 16, 2014

All of us
have been reading so much about - Malaysia Airlines passenger Flight "MH370" that disappeared on 8 March 2014
after departing from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to its scheduled destination in
Beijing, China. The aircraft servicing the flight, a Boeing 777-200ER, last
made contact with air traffic control less than an hour after take-off. The
aircraft was operated by Malaysia Airlines and was carrying 12 crew members and
227 passengers from 15 countries. Sadly, till date, the whereabouts of the
crafts are still unknown……….. an unprecedented international effort is under
way from space to track the missing Malaysian passenger jet as satellite
operators, government agencies and rival nations sweep their gaze across two
oceans in search of elusive debris or data. The search has now widened to the
Andaman Sea, North-west of the Malay Peninsula, with only one precious clue-an
ephemeral 'ping' detected five or six times after the plane lost contact-picked
up in orbit.

It assumes
some added significance to us in India that Malaysia's Premier Najib Razak on
Sunday spoke to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh seeking India's help in the
massive search with Malaysian investigators suspecting that the communication system in the missing
aircraft was "deliberately disabled" and its transponder switched off
before it veered from its path and flew for more than seven hours. With
Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak's revelation that the missing flight could
have gone anywhere in the Northern corridor from Kazakhstan to Thailand or in
the Southern corridor into the Indian Ocean, the scope of search operation
being carried out by the Indian armed forces has further expanded. The Indian
military aircraft spent much of Saturday scanning the Bay of Bengal in what has
already become one of the biggest hunts for a missing plane. That also rises
some uncomfortable questions on the air defence systems. If the flight did enter the Andaman Sea, on
way to the Bay of Bengal, Indian air defence radars should have ideally
detected it. According to senior Indian
Air Force (IAF) officials, India does maintain a radar north of Port Blair in
the Andaman Islands. This radar is primarily directed at the Myanmar's Coco
Islands, which is believed to serve as a base for Chinese military activity.

The internet
has been abuzz with conspiracy theories about flight MH370’s disappearance,
from terrorists to Tintin, some vaguely plausible, others simply ridiculous...
one of them is that the plane has been taken to Vietnam, where it is waiting to
be used as a weapon in a 9/11 style attack. Because some relatives of
passengers have heard ringing tones on their loved ones’ mobiles, rather than
being put straight through to voicemail, they believe it is evidence they were
still alive.

Whether it
had any extraordinary VIP on board could lend a totally different perspective…….
Some reports suggest that it was ‘IT heavy’ – with an IBM executive and 20
members of a Texan IT company aboard…. In his comic book Flight 714, published
in 1968, Belgian cartoonist Hergé penned a plot which resembles some aspects of
the Malaysian mystery.

Malaysian
authorities have remained stoic and perhaps are adding more angles …. FBI
experts have been quoted as stating that disappearance could be ‘act of piracy’, suggesting
passengers are being held at undisclosed location… Police are also investigating the possibility that the pilot
of missing Flight MH370 hijacked his own aircraft in a bizarre political
protest. The Mail reports that Captain
Zaharie Ahmad Shah was an ‘obsessive’ supporter of Malaysia’s opposition
leader, Anwar Ibrahim; hours before the doomed flight left Kuala Lumpur it is
understood 53-year-old Shah attended a controversial trial in which Ibrahim was
jailed for five years. The theory states that the Captain was a vocal political
activist – and fear that the court decision left him profoundly upset. Malaysian
police searched his house in the upmarket Kuala Lumpur suburb of Shah Alam,
where he had installed a home-made flight simulator.

After the
initial days of searching yielding no clues, came reports of Satellite data
showing hijacked MH370 last seen flying towards Pakistan Or Indian
Ocean ……. according to a map drawn up by
U.S. radio station WNYC, there are 634 locations which could fit, from
Australia to the Maldives to Pakistan ~ and it is further confounded by the saying
that true number is likely to be even higher, as estimates of how far the plane
could have travelled have been increased since the calculations were carried
out.

Another pointer
to human angle is that shortly afterwards, near the cross-over point between
Malaysian and Vietnamese air traffic controllers, the plane’s transponder,
which emits an identifying signal, was switched off or, less likely, failed. According
to a military radar, the aircraft then turned and flew back over Malaysia
before heading in a north-west direction.

Technology is
so advanced……….. it is stated that if an apple device goes missing – icloud can
track easily the missing iphone, ipad, ipod touch or Mac on a map….. then one
can decide the further course of action…
but more than a week after a plane went missing with invaluable human
lives on board …. We are only confounded by more theories. To conclude there is another dimension beyond
that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless
as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science
and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of
his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area called
the Twilight Zone.

The Twilight
Zone is an American television anthology series created by Rod Serling. It is a
series of unrelated stories containing drama, psychological thriller, fantasy,
science fiction, suspense, and/or horror, often concluding with a macabre or
unexpected twist. A popular and critical success, it introduced many Americans
to serious science fiction and abstract ideas through television and also
through a wide variety of Twilight Zone literature.

Sad human
lives are lost…….. or is there still hope for those on board and their
relatives ?

Sadly, till date, the whereabouts of the crafts are still unknown……….. an unprecedented international effort is under way from space to track the missing Malaysian passenger jet as satellite operators, government agencies and rival nations sweep their gaze across two oceans in search of elusive debris or data.